Information about the New Terms of Use and Updated Privacy Notice for Firefox

[AshleyT]

For the first time, we’re introducing a Terms of Use for Firefox, alongside an updated Privacy Notice.

Earlier today, we published a blog post explaining why we’re making this change and what it means for you.

Now, we want to hear from you.

We’re committed to engaging with our community and keeping you informed about how we build Firefox—and why we make the decisions we do. Firefox wouldn’t be where it is today without the support of our users, and we want to continue working together to build a better internet for all.

To kick off the discussion, here are a few key points from the blog post:

• Transparency matters. We’re introducing a Terms of Use to provide clarity on what users agree to before starting to browse.
• Privacy remains a priority. Our updated Privacy Notice gives a more detailed, easy-to-read explanation of our data practices.
• You stay in control. Firefox is designed to respect user choice, with responsible defaults and simple tools to manage your data.

We’d love to hear your thoughts! Check out the full blog post and share your feedback here. If you have any questions, let us know—we’ll be actively monitoring the discussion and will reply where we can.

[NTICompass]

What the heck do you mean by this:

> Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example.

NO ONE wants YOU (Mozilla) to use information typed info Firefox (the "private" web browser).  You need to better explain what in the world you're doing with this new ToS, your blog post and this thread don't do a great job explaining what you're doing.  You need to be WAY MORE transparent here.

It's clear that Mozilla employees aren't reading the negative replies to the posts here, but this one seems important.  @AshleyT and Mozilla, please READ the replies here and fix this.

[xfvh]

Your new acceptable use policy is bizarrely restrictive, completely unnecessary, and outright absurd.

[AshleyT]

Thanks everyone for your active participation here. We knew this would have a lot of interest and so we’ve waited to dive into the conversation because we see some themes emerging that I’ll respond to broadly here. The main concerns I’m noting are around the license agreements we declare, our use of data for AI, and our Acceptable Use Policy. Below are a few clarifications to each of these areas.

• Regarding our position around licensing, we need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use the words you type into Firefox to perform your searches, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice. We’ve added this note to our blog to clarify, so thank you for your feedback.

• With respect to AI, our goal with Firefox is to build a browser that meets all the needs of a modern internet user while protecting your privacy and your rights online. In some cases we have some new features such as AI chatbot integrations, which require users to opt in to use them. In other cases, in order to make Firefox more functional, we deploy some local AI models to enable things like suggesting alt-text for accessibility purposes. These latter features are on by default but operate locally and we clarify exactly how the data is used in the Privacy Notice. They can also be turned off if you choose. 

• Our Acceptable Use policy has been in effect for some time now. These broad principles govern what we think is appropriate behavior on the specific user platforms we manage, like Mozconnect and our support platforms, not your browsing behavior. They are reflective of our Mozilla Manifesto principles and our mission to build a better Internet.

I’ll also drop a few replies where appropriate, but thank you again for your continued engagement. Criticism through moments of change is hard to stomach, but we’re committed to doing the right thing by you, our users.

[rdavidatwell]

@AshleyT, if any of that is true, how has Firefox survived for the last twenty years without it? If nothing is going to change, why is anything changing?

Regarding our position around licensing, we need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use the words you type into Firefox to perform your searches, for example.

This galls me to no end and makes me seriously question the assumption of good faith I was extending before. You don't need a license to perform searches. If you did, a user would have to agree to a license before Google allowed them to click "Search," but they don't.

In some cases we have some new features such as AI chatbot integrations, which require users to opt in to use them.

Then the Terms of Use should be agreed to at opt-in, not as a blanket agreement to use the browser.

In other cases, in order to make Firefox more functional, we deploy some local AI models to enable things like suggesting alt-text for accessibility purposes. These latter features are on by default but operate locally and we clarify exactly how the data is used in the Privacy Notice. They can also be turned off if you choose. 

If they're truly entirely local, then you don't need a privacy policy to run them. As noted above, I was entirely willing to give you the benefit of the doubt before, but this explanation is squandering quite a lot of my goodwill because it sounds so horribly sneaky.

Our Acceptable Use policy has been in effect for some time now. These broad principles govern what we think is appropriate behavior on the specific user platforms we manage, like Mozconnect and our support platforms, not your browsing behavior. They are reflective of our Mozilla Manifesto principles and our mission to build a better Internet.

I'm sure that very few people are concerned about an AUP or TOS applied to an online service like Mozconnect. We're concerned with you applying such a thing to our web browser. Surely you understand that.

I’ll also drop a few replies where appropriate, but thank you again for your continued engagement. Criticism through moments of change is hard to stomach, but we’re committed to doing the right thing by you, our users.

Every single megacorp that intended to do something awful with stolen data has said the same thing. Before this week, though, I would've presumed that you were telling the truth about a commitment to do right by us. Before this afternoon, I would've presumed that you were misguided about this TOS, but still ultimately intended to do right by us. But after this comment that I'm replying to, I'll never be able to trust such a thing again. I'm going to have to watch Mozilla like a hawk from here on out, which is a shame.

You used to be one of the heroes.

[zyvod]

preach. this is obvious corporate scumbaggery, and they're throwing a new employee who's been with mozilla less than a year to the wolves to make her the target of the all the abuse mozilla rightly deserves for this transparently awful move.

I'm switching to LibreWolf tonight, and I'm warning everyone I know about this as well. Mozilla deserves the grizzly end they're going to get over this. utterly appalling, especially how they just keep lying to our faces when the legal text they've put up is extremely clear. they want to steal everything we do with the browser, the TOS lets them do that, and they are straight up lying about their intentions.

@ash, your evil corporate overlords have made you the sacrificial pawn here. quit this job and find another one before being involved in this mess damages your life. I'm sure you personally had nothing to do with these decisions, and have no ability to fix this disaster. get out while you still can, girl.

[rdavidatwell]

Incidentally, @AshleyT , I know you're just doing your job. We're mad at the company, not at you in particular. But please stop giving us the company line. This is bad, bad, bad; and pretending like these are minor disagreements that can just be explained and clarified away is missing the entire point we're making. We know what Mozilla means (or at least, what they want us to understand) by the policy. We have no issues with the platitudes. We have all the concern in the world about the policy itself.

[JamesHill]

Mozilla has no right to in any way use or store the things the new policy mentions, nor do they need to. you are lying out of your ass.

edit: to be clear, I am referring to the company and not the employee specifically.

[SirWolf]

The new CEO should be just fired, she's been doing nothing but destroying Firefox from the start.

[Natureshadow]

> Regarding our position around licensing, we need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use the words you type into Firefox to perform your searches, for example.

Quite clearly NOT.

Firefox is a program running locally on my computer. I type things into search engines using it. If at any point here my search query even comes close to a Mozilla server, that is a serious bug in itself.

[alienghic]

Please allow people donating to the mozilla foundation to elect representatives to the board of directors so we can vote to decide if it's possible to fund raise to keep firefox instead of turning to advertising.

[welyr]

Ashley,

Thank you for writing.   I want to be clear what I’m saying here really isn’t about you, it’s about the text of the Terms of Use.  Such policies are written by lawyers, and my own experience dealing has taught me to be skeptical of anything a lawyer says or writes if they are not actually working -for me-.  I apologize for the fact that I will be addressing the language of the Terms of Use and other policies from that perspective.

You wrote:

Regarding our position around licensing, we need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible.

I notice you are using the word “license” and not saying “Terms of Use”. Firefox already had a license, and I agreed to it at the time I previously installed it. That is separate from the Terms of Use, and as @rdavidatwell wrote earlier “Terms of Use and Privacy Policy documents are for web services, not for browsers”. The fundamental reason I am upset is because it looks like Firefox is transitioning from being a piece of software to a “service” which has “Terms of Use”.  That means now those terms can change at any time even if I’m not installing a new copy or version of that software.

Then there is the “Privacy Policy”. I pulled up the old version in archive.org, and there are definitely big changes which appear to authorize data to be collected and used for advertising purposes. As @jkaelin  points out above, it looks like a very important promise that “we don’t sell your personal data” is also being removed from the code. That seems like a big deal.

Regarding your second bullet:

With respect to AI, our goal with Firefox is to build a browser that meets all the needs of a modern internet user while protecting your privacy and your rights online.

My need in the current “high threat environment” is a browser with no AI and zero telemetry so that I can have the maximum amount of privacy and security I can achieve. You acknowledge that there are AI features that are on by default. And while you state that this can be disabled, in fact I was unaware of the “alt-text” AI specifically until you pointed it out. I can therefore conclude based on Mozilla’s direction and what you are saying is that other AI features which are “on by default” will be added in the future, and that I might not even know about them or that I would need to turn them off. (that’s not even getting into whether turning the feature off really achieves what I need: not just to hide features but to ensure they are not there at all).

In your third bullet you wrote:

Our Acceptable Use policy has been in effect for some time now. These broad principles govern what we think is appropriate behavior on the specific user platforms we manage, like Mozconnect and our support platforms, not your browsing behavior.

But the language of the FireFox “Terms of Use” state:

Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy, and you agree that you will not use Firefox to infringe anyone’s rights or violate any applicable laws or regulations.

This is specifically stating that FireFox, not MozConnect, must comply with the Acceptable Use Policy.  If the intent was what you stated, then that language in the Terms of Use is simply wrong.

Unfortunately all that matters in the end is the language of the terms of service, not anything you might say or promise here. 

Additionally this new policy was rolled out to be effective immediately rather than say 30 days from now.  People didn’t really have time to evaluate or ask questions about it before it went into effect. That by itself is a problem.  We must now assume Mozilla could change the Terms of Use with zero notice and people will only see it long after changes go into effect. 

I hope Mozilla will consider changing their direction.

[fraggedy_andy]

Now we're getting mixed messages from Mozilla. The ToU says that we "hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox." But don't say how long you have those rights for. However your privacy says you don't have rights to our data.

WHICH ONE IS IT? You haven't clarified anything. If anything, it's worse!

[KelsonV]

"we need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible."

No, you don't. You never have before, and you don't need it now. Anything that doesn't go through your servers, you don't need a license for. And anything that doesn't *need* to go through your servers shouldn't be going through them in the first place.

[X27]

How is this a good thing?

So when I write story's images and videos I upload via the browser it is supposed to be between my computer and the website and no middle man, this seems no better privacy for us user's

I really don't want to change browser's but if Mozilla is going this route then the future of Firefox and your company is beyond recovery at this point

be better Mozilla

[SirWolf]

I'm beyond angry, and it's staggering that you underestimated our reaction to this so badly. You've gone too far. Shame on you.

[SirWolf]

A bit of reminder from old times:

"Net neutrality, also known as network neutrality, is the principle that all internet traffic should be treated equally by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This means that ISPs should not discriminate or charge differently based on the user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication. The concept is designed to ensure a free and open internet, where users can access all legal content and services without interference or preference from ISPs."

Now compare that to what Firefox is doing right now.

[mattl_]

Mozilla doesn’t need to build any AI things. 

All Mozilla needs to do is: make a web browser that is standards compliant and does not adopt any of the nonsense that for-profit companies are doing to try and destroy the web. 

Mozilla doesn’t need to run a VPN service, data broker service or anything else. 

I just want my money to donate to the development of the browser. 

No AI stuff. No cryptocurrency donations. No proprietary plugins. No DRM. 

Firefox shouldn’t even have a EULA. Mozilla should be collecting ZERO information from the browser that they cannot collect from httpd logs. 

Anything beyond Firefox browsing the web and Thunderbird sending/receiving email/usenet messages should nothing for Mozilla to worry about. 

[merewin]

Mozilla should just go ahead and dissolve at this point. Betraying every single thing the Mozilla has stood for, for the past decade or more, over some ridiculous, planet destroying, thieving AI fad. Every single person who works for Mozilla is a failure, and should be ashamed of themselves.

[Thomasns]

I have been a loyal Firefox user since 1. There's been some disappointing decisions before but this one is over the line. I'm out and taking my VPN sub elsewhere. 

[simpaticoder]

Regarding your new terms of service and in particular this paragraph:

You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

I've been a strong proponent of Firefox for many years, since it came out around 2005, and have consistently suggested it to users as an alternative to Chrome (and Safari, where possible). I cannot continue to do so in good conscience given these terms. Nor can I continue using Firefox myself under these terms.

You are asserting ownership of all information I input through Firefox. Do you undrstand what this means in an age where we all interact with *everything* through the browser? Can you imagine if Microsoft or Apple asserted the same rights for their operating systems? As it stands, with this clause you give yourselves carte blanche to everything I say, do, or make and use your browser to send it to various sites. You give yourselves unrestricted access to my passwords, accounts, and interactions with those accounts with banks, medical providers, customers, friends, and more.

As of today, I am switching to Chromium (or a reasonable fork). Whether or not you reconsider this clause, the damage has been done to at least one user's trust, and I will not be coming back. I'm not sure what your intention was, but I also don't care: you should know better than to alienate your users, who are, as a class, more privacy- and rights-focused than average and yet you managed to poke us ALL right in the eye with this misstep.

To echo Dune's "may your knife chip and shatter", let me say: May your funding dry up and wither along with your already paultry market-share. I see now that your critics were right, that Mozilla existed merely as a fig leaf for Google's browser monopoly. Given the current political climate, it seems likely to me that Google will not need that fig leaf much longer, which leaves you, your legal teams, your leadership, and your engineers, looking for a job. Which perhaps explains this move, which gives Google a fig-leaf of another sort - they can now say, "Hey, look, WE aren't the bad guys, they are." Or, if you succeed in normalizing this outrageous power grab, they can grab the same power, too.

Shame on you, Mozilla. This bridge is burned and I don't think it can be rebuilt.

[Grugspro]

The new terms are vague and unacceptable, state clearly how and where the data is transferred to. I use Firefox to get away from data scrapers, and your removal of the promise to not sell my data in the Firefox FAQ is seen disapprovingly.

[FredJupiter]

"upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information"

Such sloppy wording is extremely risky. The expression obviously includes also my binary data including what I upload on behalf of my employer, i.e. his and other's confidential data. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE.

[i430VX]

As a longtime (admittedly not nearly as long of a time as some people here, however) Firefox user, I am very disappointed to see this change and lack of sufficient clarification and segmentation on the changes.

This said, I am frequently willing to play devil's advocate. As much of a shame as it is, maybe there is a valid argument for having AI/whatever services available in the browser to attract/retain a specific segment of users. Some of these services, being well, services, could feasibly need a terms of use attached to them for whatever reasons. And I do understand that Mozilla has not had a particularly good financial situation in quite some time, so the need to make money is there. I get that. But don't enshrine it into the policies that supporting Mozilla financially or in other ways with our data is a requirement to use the browser.

When there's a significant and very passionate installed user base of technical people who are using the product for privacy-oriented reasons, ambiguity and overzealousness with the privacy permissions / rights / licenses Mozilla grants themselves is not going to do this user base any favours. Even if it is NOT the intention at all for Mozilla to be construing that EVERYTHING happening by users in the Firefox browser has a license granted to Mozilla for their use, can be data-mined for profit, whatever... the current wording appears (IANAL) to be readily interpretable as such. If this intention really, truly, is not the case, then it is essential to properly reword the terms thoroughly to say exactly what is meant and exactly where, when, & how it applies, if this happens by default or is an opt-in thing. The premise (as can be interpreted presently) that a universal and unforgiving license deal is needed to use what is essentially a fancy tool and NOT (at its core, anyway) a service is just nuts.

As an example think of, say, a digital camera. This is usually completely (or virtually completely) a product... a tool. It may have auxiliary services, maybe cloud sync or automatic photo editing, whatever, I don't know. Feasibly these aspects could need terms of use to avoid liability on the company's part. Or whatever their goal is. But I think it is very likely you will not find a camera itself with terms of use, or one that grants the manufacturer rights to do as they please with any and all photos taken with the camera. Again... maybe this isn't Mozilla's intention, but plain and simple, it's how it's been laid out, and this is likely not going to be acceptable to a very large number of people.

I feel as if anything that would fall under the realm of being able to be used/sold by Mozilla should be opt in only and very clearly present the conditions of it on opt in. Heck, even make it easy to opt in. Add it on the first run screen that exists in the browser for new installations and/or major upgrades. It is just a certainty however that to a lot of people having such features or services exist on the platform at all will already make them uncomfortable.

I miss the days of "classic" Firefox for sure, but I still think it's a good browser. In fact I think its considerably better now than it was a few years ago. I try my best to promote the Firefox and other FOSS that I like - it would be a shame to see Firefox succumb to disconnection from the user base such as numerous other projects over time. Especially in this case when there's (IMO) no serious non-chromium options out there. I think a lot of people would argue that the death already happened some time ago, but I am hopeful that there is still a chance to recover.

[zackc]

You guys just deleted the promise you made about never selling our data:

"Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise"

[kalib_tweli]

Why not just have a paid subscription option? Why do we have just straight to selling our data?

[RipFirefox2]

Firefox, I still rmember when you where the promising new kid on the block. Sad to see you go over to the dark side. RIP.

You will be uninstalled from my and my families devices.

[j0s]

Please understand that the primary goal of the mozilla foubdation is to push the DEI agenda. The browser is only a way to generate funds for this goal. The funds generated must be maximized. You surely understand that.

[nfg]

I have been using Firefox since the early days, and before that the Mozilla Suite. It saddens me, but it is now clear that it is time to move on. I cannot accept this Terms of Use. You have decided to become an advertising and activist organization. Thank God for Capitalism and Free Software, I can choose to use another browser that will not collect my data or force their politics on me.

I hope the browser lives on in another form, but Mozilla Foundation and Corporation are defunct if this is the way you choose to go.

[pva]

Privacy is not a concept with shades of gray. Just as it is impossible to be "a little pregnant," it is impossible to be "a little private." Firefox’s decision to stop protecting users from ads puts it on the same level as browsers that gradually restrict users' rights over time. This is unacceptable. If this decision is not reversed soon, I will stop all donations and start looking for an alternative browser. I hope a fork will emerge because the technology itself was developed by those who are not the ones making such decisions now.